"At the GNOME Developer Experience Hackfest in Brussels, the GNOME developer community has tackled the problem of specifying a canonical development language for writing applications for the GNOME desktop. According to a blog post by Collabora engineer and GNOME developer Travis Reitter, members of the GNOME team are often asked what tools should be used when writing an application for the desktop environment and, up until now, there has been no definitive answer. The team has now apparently decided to standardise on JavaScript for user-facing applications while still recommending C as the language to write system libraries in." Discuss.

In any case, there is no reason you can't have your cake and eat it to. I'm not suggesting that they build gnome out of standards compliant web widgets. You can go nuts extending things and including custom, gnome-only widgets.

But the fundamental language for expressing things should HTML/CSS + DOM for traversal, manipulation and introspection. Drop jQuery into the mix and you have a powerful app development combo that no existing gnome (or Qt) tech can touch. And when I say powerful I don't mean in terms of some specific feature, I just mean 95% of all potential apps can be built 50% faster, 2X more robustly by 10X more people.